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Resumo O estudo esboça algumas compreensões sobre a palavra “higiene”. A partir do Renascimento, a ideia advinda da Grécia Antiga voltou a ser trabalhada, primeiramente como método para uma organização dietética e moral da vida que visava ao seu prolongamento. De uma espécie de cuidado de si, transformou-se em conceito de governança, cujo objetivo era o prolongamento da vida dos súditos/cidadãos. O debate teórico sobre o que era higiene pública mostra sua faceta eminentemente política: não apenas era um ramo da economia política, mas também eram analisadas as propostas dos higienistas de acordo com seu maior ou menor impacto na política. A batalha político-científica resultou na vitória de certas compreensões de ação estatal, e no esquecimento e na negligência de outras. Abstract This study outlines some understandings of the word "hygiene.” The notion that originated in ancient Greece first began to be adopted as a system of diet and morals to prolong the lifespan. From a type of self-care, this idea transformed into a concept of governance to extend the lives of subject-citizens. The theoretical debate about what public hygiene used to be shows its eminently political side: not only was hygiene a branch of the political economy, the ideas of hygienists were also analyzed as to the degree of impact they had on policy. After political and scientific battles, certain understandings of government action emerged victorious, while others were forgotten and neglected.

Starting in 1865, regulations pursuant to public hygiene issued by the Unitary Government provided for administrative and political control of the funerary practice. Specifically, they regulated the management of cemeteries and the burials, increasingly drawing the funeral rituals from the control of the Church and of Catholicism, therefore secularising death for the construction of a new political religion. Hygiene became fundamental in order to promulgate cremation as a system of preserving the integrity of the bodies, preserving the ashes as a tangible and indestructible product of body matter and as a measure to protect public health by eliminating the risk of miasmatic pollution of the air caused by the cadaveric fumes. In the early 1870s, the practice of cremation began to spread, especially in the territories of Lombardy-Veneto and Savoy, as an expression of the progressive policies of the new Italian state, antagonistic to the old Catholic religious traditions. This paper intends to highlight the key aspects of the political significance that the cremation took on during the Risorgimento period, while also illustrating the methods adopted by important authors from that time period regarding incineration techniques and cremation methods.

Summary This article examines the history of dog mess in Paris, from its ‘discovery’ in the late 1920s to the management regime of the early twenty-first century. Mayor Jacques Chirac’s anti-excrement campaigns in the 1980s are a particular focus. Situating the meaning and management of dog mess within histories of public hygiene and disgust, and mobilising insights from work on public hygiene, biopolitics and governmentality, this article shows how Chirac’s attempt to produce self-regulating and responsible dog owners through education failed to persuade them to overcome their disgust at their pets’ excrement. Fining alongside education proved a more effective management strategy. The history of dog mess in Paris highlights the biopolitical problems raised by animal excrement decades after the apogee of the public hygiene movement, and shows how human–animal partnerships expose the limits of governmentality approaches to public hygiene and neo-liberal urban governance.

The chapter analyses the radical changes in the supply chain of building materials and construction between 1850 and 1910. It investigates the consequences for the four building challenges in this period: public hygiene, public housing, the struggle against water and the development of road infrastructure. The hygienists succeeded in getting the issue of urban pollution due to faeces and other organic waste on the societal agenda. Despite this, the effect of the movement on the health of the poor and workers in this period was still minimal. Realising the hygienist program demanded firm municipal policy and large investments. Moreover there was exuberant debate on the nature of the measures to be taken. Public housing too became a significant political issue thanks to the efforts of the progressive bourgeoisie and socially conscious entrepreneurs. The most important result was the passing of the Housing Law of 1901, that provided the future framework for the condemnation, dispossession and improvement of dwellings. In the field of water management, the government public works agency (Rijkswaterstaat), intensified its struggle against regularly recurring river floods. An impressive program of river normalisation was carried out under its leadership. Successive governments would devote much attention to infrastructure with the aim of improving welfare, reinforcing the position of the maritime harbours and improving the accessibility of remote regions. The construction of a network of canals and railways guaranteed the spatial integration of the Netherlands and had far-reaching consequences for the modernisation of the economy.